Updated September 4, 2026. Prices, plans and features are as published on each vendor's own site on that date and may change.
Five tools will alert you when your Shopify store goes down: StatusBird and Blimey Down Detector are installed from the Shopify App Store, while UptimeRobot, Pingdom and Uptime.com are external monitors that watch any URL. The differences that matter are what each one watches (only your storefront, or also the payment, email and shipping services behind it), which channels it alerts on, how often it checks, and what the free tier covers.
Which apps alert you when a Shopify store goes down?
| App | What it monitors | Alert channels | Check interval | Free tier | Paid from | Shopify App Store |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| StatusBird | 84 third-party services (Stripe, Shopify, Klaviyo, ShipStation, PayPal and more) plus your own storefront on Pro | SMS, email, Slack, Teams, Discord on Pro; next-day email digest on Free | Every 2 minutes | Yes: 1 service, live dashboard, day-after incident digest | $29/mo (Pro) | Yes, listed July 24, 2026 |
| Blimey Down Detector | Your storefront from multiple locations, Shopify platform status, SSL certificate expiry | Not published on the listing | Yes: the whole app is free | Free | Yes, listed March 26, 2026 | |
| UptimeRobot | Any URL you point it at (homepage, cart, checkout) | Email and push; Slack, Teams and Telegram on paid plans; SMS and voice by purchased credits | 5 minutes on Free, 60 seconds on Solo, 30 seconds on Team | Yes: 50 monitors | $12/mo (Solo, $144/yr) | No, external service |
| Pingdom | Any URL, plus scripted transaction checks | Email, SMS, webhook, mobile push and integrations | 1 minute | No: 30-day free trial | Usage-based; priced by the calculator on pingdom.com/pricing | No, external service |
| Uptime.com | Any URL, API and transaction checks from 80+ locations | Email, SMS, phone call, push, webhook, Slack, Teams, Telegram | 1 minute | No: 30-day money-back guarantee | $9/mo ($108/yr) | No, external service |
Sources: StatusBird pricing, the Blimey Down Detector listing, UptimeRobot pricing, Pingdom pricing and Uptime.com pricing, all checked September 4, 2026.
Which failures does each app actually see?
Blimey, UptimeRobot, Pingdom and Uptime.com answer one question: does your storefront respond when a probe requests it. On Shopify that is a narrower question than it sounds, because Shopify hosts the storefront and its engineers watch that infrastructure around the clock. A storefront ping mostly re-detects incidents Shopify already knows about, plus problems on your own custom domain such as a DNS change or an expired certificate. Pingdom and Uptime.com go one step further with transaction checks that click through add-to-cart and checkout, which catches a theme change that breaks the buy button.
StatusBird answers a different question: are the services your store runs on up. It reads the official status feed of 84 e-commerce services every 2 minutes, including Shopify itself (with separate pages for Shopify Checkout and Shopify Payments), Stripe, PayPal, Klaviyo and ShipStation. Those outages never show up on a storefront ping: your homepage loads perfectly while Stripe declines every card. On the Pro plan StatusBird also runs synthetic checks on your own storefront URL, so one app covers both layers.
How fast will each app tell you?
Check interval sets the ceiling on how quickly an alert can arrive. Pingdom and Uptime.com check every minute. UptimeRobot checks every 5 minutes on the free plan and every 60 seconds on the $12/month Solo plan. StatusBird checks every 2 minutes and sends Pro alerts within that cycle; the free plan sends a digest the day after an incident rather than a real-time alert, which is the honest trade-off for $0. Blimey describes its alerts as instant email but does not publish a check interval on its listing.
Channel matters as much as interval. Email is the channel most likely to sit unread during a live outage. Blimey alerts by email only. UptimeRobot adds Slack, Teams and Telegram on paid plans and sells SMS and voice credits separately. Pingdom and Uptime.com include SMS, and Uptime.com adds phone calls. StatusBird Pro sends SMS, email, Slack, Teams and Discord, with quiet hours and per-service alert thresholds.
What does each app cost?
Two of the five are free at the level most small stores need. Blimey is entirely free. UptimeRobot gives you 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals for free, which is more than enough to cover a homepage, a collection page, a product page and the checkout URL. StatusBird's free plan monitors one third-party service with a live dashboard and a next-day digest; real-time alerts on every channel and all 84 services start at $29/month on Pro, with Business at $49/month and Agency at $99/month for up to 10 client storefronts. Uptime.com starts at $9/month billed yearly. Pingdom has no free plan and no flat starting price on its pricing page; you size a plan with its calculator after a 30-day trial.
Which should a Shopify store pick?
- Zero budget: install Blimey for storefront pings and open a free StatusBird account for your payment processor. Both cost nothing and cover different failures.
- You ship theme changes often: add a transaction check from Pingdom or Uptime.com, or a Shopify app that runs UI tests, so a broken checkout button is caught within minutes. See the Shopify uptime apps roundup for those.
- Your revenue depends on Stripe, Klaviyo or ShipStation: StatusBird Pro, because those outages do not register on any storefront ping and the SMS arrives within the 2-minute check cycle.
- You run several stores or clients: UptimeRobot's Team plan for URLs, or StatusBird Agency for up to 10 storefronts plus the vendor layer with white-labelled alerts.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shopify alert me when my store goes down?
Not directly. Shopify publishes incidents on shopifystatus.com, where a Subscribe to Updates button lets you receive incident notices, but those cover Shopify's platform, not your specific store, your custom domain or the third-party services you use. A store-level alert needs one of the tools above.
Is there a free app that alerts you when a Shopify store is down?
Yes. Blimey Down Detector is free on the Shopify App Store and emails you when your storefront stops responding. UptimeRobot's free plan does the same for any URL from outside Shopify. StatusBird's free plan covers one third-party service with a next-day digest; real-time alerts are on the $29/month Pro plan.
Do I need a Shopify app, or can I use an external monitor?
For storefront pings, an external monitor works fine and needs no install. The App Store advantage is billing through Shopify and, for StatusBird, a one-click connection to the store. What matters more than where the tool lives is whether it watches only your storefront or also the services behind it.
StatusBird is not affiliated with Blimey, UptimeRobot, Pingdom, Uptime.com, Better Stack, StatusGator or IsDown. Product names are used to identify the products only. Nothing here is a criticism of those tools; they are built for different jobs.